A new life for the novel

After 9/11, writers feared that the new age of terror would overwhelm their ability to reflect the world. But it has only heightened their powers. As the Booker panel prepares to announce its longlist, a former judge argues that this is the best year yet for British fiction since the prize began

As long ago as 1960 Philip Roth wrote that the American writer, in the middle of the 20th century, 'has his hands full in trying to understand, describe and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.'

Something similar was said in the febrile aftermath of 11 September 2001 when there seemed to be general agreement among many critics and writers of fiction that a certain kind of literature was no longer possible; that, as Andrew O'Hagan wrote: 'Language is something else now, and so is imagery, and so is originality.' The idea, wrote James Wood, that the 'novelist's task is to go on to the street and figure social reality may well have been altered by the events of 11 September, merely through the reminder that, whatever the novel gets up to, the "culture" can always get up to something bigger'.

Informing much of what was written by novelists at the time was the anxiety that, in the present circumstances, fiction was either irrelevant or incapable of offering a convincing representation of a new, changed world rendered so dangerously unstable by religious terrorists; that the monumentality of what had happened would overwhelm even the artistic impulse itself.

Yet the evidence from the new novels I have read so far this year is quite the contrary - our writers have not allowed the extremity of 11 September and the wars that have followed to silence or defeat them; their imaginations seem far from meagre. The 'culture' is not overwhelming them. Quite the opposite, in fact, because this is, I think, perhaps the richest year for contemporary British and Commonwealth fiction since the launch of the Booker Prize in 1969, with most of our best novelists - Ian McEwan (Saturday), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), Zadie Smith (On Beauty), JM Coetzee (Slow Man), Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown), Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black) - publishing exceptional new works.

Having read most of these novels, as well as outstanding books from emerging writers such as Louise Dean (This Human Season, which is set in a Belfast riven by sectarian conflict) and James Meek (The People's Act of Love, which is set in Siberia during the years following the Russian Revolution), I would argue that the novel, so often declared dead or moribund by VS Naipaul and other cultural pessimists, is as vital now in this time of profound political crisis as it has ever been - and continues, through the popularity of reading groups and the huge influence of television programmes such as the Richard and Judy Book Club as well as the astonishing popularity of global bestsellers such as the Harry Potter books and Dan Brown's conspiracy thrillers, to be the principal artistic form of our times.

Why is this? The obvious answer is that no other art form privileges consciousness and interiority in quite the same way. One can tell fabulous stories through moving images, but how to show thought in film without resorting to the clumsy device of the voice over? How to show in film what Virginia Woolf called the 'quick of the mind'? Only the novel can truly show, from the inside, how it feels to move through space and time, from one day to the next, with contradictory thoughts constantly clashing, over the narrative of a lifetime.

Nor is any other art form as versatile or flexible as the novel - two of the best 'novels' of this year, Dan Jacobson's All for Love and Barnes's Arthur & George, are scarcely what you would call novels at all. They are, more accurately, fictional recastings of actual events, using all the devices of biography. Barnes returns to the beginning of the last century to excavate a long-buried true crime story that attracted the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle while Jacobson goes further back as he, drawing on the protagonists' own published writings, retells the story of a doomed love affair between Princess Louise, the daughter of King Leopold II of the Belgians, and a Croatian army officer, Geza Mattachich, an affair that so scandalised the court of the old, dying Austro-Hungarian empire. Significantly, if you are looking for clues as to who might be on this year's Booker shortlist, the novels of Jacobson and Barnes have been praised with characteristic perspicacity by one of the judges, the critic and literary editor David Sexton.

When I judged the Booker, in 1997, it seemed to me generally to be a bad time for fiction, with the British novel being increasingly characterised by nothing so much as introversion, nostalgia and mistrust of the fictional possibilities of the present. So many of the books I read as a judge were essentially costume or historical dramas, in thrall to the past, under-imagined, and written in blandly measured prose. Where was the energy that I saw elsewhere all around me in pop, rave and street culture? Where were the novels, I wondered, that told us how it felt to be alive, right here and now in Britain at the end of the 20th century? Where were the British equivalents of the Americans Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, David Foster Wallace or Toni Morrison? To me, as a reader, everything seemed too neat and orderly in the garden of English fiction, and so many of our novels were largely a reflection of the times in which we lived: safe, affluent, complacent, at ease.

'The only way, it seems, that an English novelist can write satisfactorily about the English present,' Sebastian Faulks, one of our leading historical novelists, told me at the time, 'is to do so in a surreal way, as Martin Amis did in Money

If an English novelist writes realistically about the present the result is usually banal, uninteresting or reads like a style piece. For some strange cultural reason when, say, Saul Bellow writes about a professor in Chicago you feel he is going to take the temperature of the soul of modern man. If an English novelist does the same, you feel it is either going to be a campus novel or an embarrassment. Something in our culture is self-mocking. If you say the word "Stoke" everyone starts laughing; but if you say "Chicago", they are impressed. Isn't it strange that our most talented novelists, from Penelope Fitzgerald to AS Byatt don't try to do the present?'

His words, I thought, were little more than a counsel of despair. What had gone wrong? Not too long before, in the early 1980s, a new generation of writers, radicalised by the upheavals of the Thatcher counter-revolution, influenced by the cultural hegemony and superabundance of America and writing against the becalmed provincialism of the immediate post-war generation of writers, had emerged determined to stake out new aesthetic territory. 'Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis,' Ian McEwan once said, 'they all seemed to come from a world I had nothing to do with. I guess the stories I was writing were a lunge at another territory, in a new country.'

Others, notably Hanif Kureishi, Martin Amis and Jeanette Winterson, as well as Rushdie and Ishiguro, used their novels as passports to enter this same new country - and for a time, in the mid-to-late Eighties, as the old order of publishing was transformed by a series of takeovers and acquisitions; as the new bookshop chains such as Waterstone's, with their exceptionally varied ranges and new promotional techniques, began to expand throughout the country; and as book prizes replaced reviews as our primary means of literary transmission, of bringing writers and readers together, there was a new kind of excitement and urgency about literary fiction. The excitement did not last.

The defining British writer of this period was surely the aggressively ambitious Martin Amis, the emblematic literary-writer-as-celebrity, in the American model. As the son of a distinguished novelist, he was from the beginning unusually interested in what it means to write fiction, and in a style that is inimitably and ostentatiously his own. His way of writing about low life in a high style - in novels such as Success, Money and London Fields - his blokey banter and ironic fascination with pornography and the worst excesses of contemporary junk culture meant that, for better or worse, he was the novelist most widely imitated, in style and voice, by any number of younger writers. He was in charge. The leader of the pack.

Yet by the time Amis came to publish his long, opaque, self-lacerating satire of literary envy and male mid-life crisis and perplexity, The Information (1995), it seemed as if his energy were diminishing, the satirical edge of his sword was blunted, his purpose distracted. Perhaps he had been defeated by his own self-imposed challenge - to evolve, as his hero Saul Bellow had before him, an exalted style appropriate to the challenge of the 20th century, what he called the 'High Style'. At around this time, Amis spoke of his desire to move to America and of how frustrated he was by the smallness and provincialism of English life, as he saw it. He wanted to write about the whole of the world; and John Major's England, in the mid-Nineties, seemed to be such a small and increasingly irrelevant part of it. Other writers seemed to share his inertia and the generation who had promised so much at the beginning of the Eighties ceased, as if in collective expression of boredom, producing vibrant or interesting work.

All this, of course, was back when the world was steady. The devastating events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the second wave of mass asylum-driven immigration into Britain and the emergence of our new wired-up, interconnected world, have changed everything in this country. As has the emergence of writers such as Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, who write with such verve and insight of the shifting realities of the lives of the new Britons, the black, Asian and mixed-race people, and their descendants, who arrived here in the post-war years and whom you seldom, if ever, encountered in novels, except in mocking or pejorative representation.

Mitzi Angel, a senior editor at Fourth Estate, and one of the most talented of the younger generation of publishing editors, says: 'It's always difficult to look for patterns in fiction, but perhaps some do stand out. There are this year, for example, the dystopian elements to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom, and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. All three novelists have imagined alternate worlds in which the interactions of man, machine, technology and political experiments result in terror. I couldn't read these without remembering David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, published last year, which also deals with a post-apocalyptic future and the breakdown of civilisation.'

Novelists have, of course, been conjuring up these sorts of visions for centuries; but, as Angel continues, 'Perhaps the uncertainties of a post-11 September world have lent this kind of questioning more urgency. This year, some novels have tackled the attacks on the World Trade Centre head-on - such as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or, very recently, Chris Cleave's Incendiary (which was published on the day of the London bombings) or Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World, published last year, in which he replays the last moments in the building.

McEwan's Saturday, by contrast, seems to be about the shift in consciousness that has occurred since the attacks; the heightened sense of danger that seeps into ordinary life ... the emphasis here is on the fragility of the domestic world.' Of this year's leading Booker contenders, Saturday certainly offers the most complete fictional response so far to the murderous attacks on New York and Washington and how they have altered the way we think, act and remember. (The visionary French novelist Michel Houellebecq's Platform, about the clash between western secularism and Islamic puritanism, was published just before 11 September.) The novel occupies a single day, Saturday 15 February 2003, when more than two million people marched in London in opposition to war in Iraq.

The central character is a successful, happily married middle aged neurosurgeon called Henry Perowne. We first meet him as he wakes, unusually early in the morning, in a state of euphoria. This disappears as soon as he rises and walks over to the window. Peering out into the dark winter sky, his wife still asleep, he sees a plane, trailing fire behind it, and apparently hurtling towards ruin. Has there been a bomb on board? Has it been hijacked? Nowadays, anything is possible. Although Perowne later discovers that the plane landed safely, his mood of unease and fear is established for the rest of the day.

'Imagine,' wrote Virginia Woolf, 'an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.' McEwan does exactly that in Saturday as we follow Perowne closely, more in thought than in action, and discover how his once-complacent world view has been altered irrevocably by the new political realities of our age of terrorism and scarcity wars. Few novelists have thought more seriously about the defining issues of our time than McEwan. Yet Saturday is his most fearful novel so far, because he shows so convincingly how acts of terrorism have the power to alter the inner life not only of culture but of the very consciousness of our age.

The impersonal forces of science have a similarly transformative capacity as Ishiguro reminds us so starkly in Never Let Me Go. To read him properly one must first adapt to the disconcerting flatness of his style - his prose reads sometimes almost as if it has been translated from Japanese, the language of his early boyhood. Detail is accumulated slowly in his fiction, like sediment on a river bank, and the narration is invariably oblique, with the usual sly withholdings.

Never Let Me Go is an allegory, set in a recognisably contemporary England and narrated by a young woman called Kathy H, who is a 'carer'. It is a long retrospective: she looks back to her childhood and adolescence at an institution called Hailsham, as well as, more briefly, forward to a desperately uncertain future. At first, she portrays Hailsham as a kind of pastoral idyll, a place of innocence and happiness. But something is wrong. Slowly you realise that Hailsham, with its vocabulary of euphemism and evasion - 'donors', 'completes', 'carers', 'possibles' - is no ordinary boarding school and its children are not even fully human, but the product of a scientific experiment, their lives preordained, the fate awaiting them desolating and monstrous.

To read Never Let Me Go alongside Saturday, although both novels are at times despairing, is not to be deflated; rather, it is to be reminded of what most gives meaning to our lives in a time of fear and what both the jihadists and scientific absolutists, in their different ways, most despise: love, loyalty, moderation, democracy, fairness, scepticism, uncertainty.

The meaning of love in a time of fear is also a theme in Zadie Smith's new novel, On Beauty, which is published in September. Her black and mixed-race characters are confused and adrift; they are all looking for something - for certainty, for meaning. Her book is about many things. It is a hugely engaging social comedy about miscegenation and cross-generational misunderstanding. It is about the vexed issue of Anglo-American relations. It is a campus novel. And it is also a smart rewriting of Howard's End. As EM Forster's novel did before it, On Beauty asks important questions about the relationship between culture and power - such as is the acquisition of knowledge and culture dependent on wealth and privilege?

Above all else, it is, like the novels of McEwan and Ishiguro, a book about the present that fulfils the most stringent test of fiction as stipulated by Ezra Pound: that it brings news of how we live that stays news. No reader can ask for more than that of a novel - especially when, as they have this year, our best novelists are engaging so imaginatively with the challenges tossed up by the culture.

· The 2005 Booker longlist is announced on 10 August and the winner on Monday 10 October